Ars Technica has published a review of SUSE LINUX 9.0 Personal Edition: "Once you complete the software installation and system configuration, you can boot SUSE up for the first time. By default, the user is presented with a KDE user interface, with which SUSE's configuration and setup tools are best integrated. KDE users will appreciate that SUSE's default desktop installation easily has the best KDE desktop out of the box among all the distributions we've tried. ... All in all, we were very impressed with how friendly the SUSE system appears to users relatively unfamiliar with Linux. Everything from the documentation and manuals provided to their setup and configuration tools seems to be designed to make things easy for the first-time user." The full review.

The openSUSE project is a community program sponsored by Novell. Promoting the use of Linux everywhere, this program provides free, easy access to openSUSE, a complete Linux distribution. The openSUSE project has three main goals: make openSUSE the easiest Linux for anyone to obtain and the most widely used Linux distribution; leverage open source collaboration to make openSUSE the world's most usable Linux distribution and desktop environment for new and experienced Linux users; dramatically simplify and open the development and packaging processes to make openSUSE the platform of choice for Linux developers and software vendors.

Ancor Gonzalez Sosa has announced the release of openSUSE 13.2, a major new version of the popular open-source operating system for desktops, laptops and servers: "Dear contributors, friends and fans: openSUSE 13.2 is out! After one year on continuous improvement in the tools and procedures and many hours of developing, packaging, testing and fixing issues, a new stable release is here, providing the best that free and open source has to offer with our special green touch: stable, innovative and fun. Green light to freedom. This is the first release after the change in the openSUSE development mode, with a much shorter stabilization phase thanks to the extensive testing done in a daily basis in the rolling distribution used now as a base for openSUSE stable releases." Read the rest of the release announcement for further information and screenshots. Download: openSUSE-13.2-DVD-x86_64.iso (4,462MB, MD5, torrent, pkglist), openSUSE-13.2-KDE-Live-x86_64.iso (909MB, MD5, torrent), openSUSE-13.2-GNOME-Live-x86_64.iso (876MB, MD5, torrent).

Kostas Koudaras has announced the availability of the first release candidate for openSUSE 13.2, the distribution's upcoming stable release scheduled for arrival in early November: "openSUSE 13.2 RC1 is baked and ready to be served. The beta release was a blast with almost 10,000 downloads. The community responded to the call and we had lots of eyes looking for bugs in openSUSE 13.2. Many of them have been already squashed and openSUSE 13.2 release candidate 1 is here to prove it. But don't fear the boredom, there are more things to test and enjoy than just bug fixes; the release candidate also brings important updates to the desktop experience. This release includes GNOME 3.14 which brings new animations, better handling of WiFi hotspots, improvements in some applications like Weather and Photos and much more. Another highlight is the brand-new Firefox 32, with new HTTP cache for improved performance and public key pinning support." Read the rest of the release announcement for more details. Download (mirrors): openSUSE-13.2-KDE-Live-Build0019-x86_64.iso (912MB, MD5, torrent), openSUSE-13.2-GNOME-Live-Build0019-x86_64.iso (908MB, MD5, torrent).

Jos Poortvliet has announced the availability of the first beta build of openSUSE 13.2, the distribution's upcoming stable release scheduled for arrival in early November: "Our brand new 'Rolling Factory' has already amassed over 6,000 installations and that's just kicking awesome. But we won't just roll: we will still create releases of openSUSE, and 13.2 is next. According to the roadmap, our latest Geeko is due in November and it will be awesome. We promise. But it doesn't come for free: you will have to help. openSUSE 13.2 will have lots of new things and lots more is coming: Linux kernel 3.16 (going for 3.17); GNOME 3.12 (planning for 3.14); Plasma Workspaces 4.11, KDE applications 4.13 mixed with 4.14 (will be all 4.14); for testing - Plasma 5.1 (will be 5.2, perhaps 5.3), Frameworks 5.2 (will be 5.5 or higher) and the latest KDE applications; btrfsprogs is now at 3.16; Btrfs will be the default file system in openSUSE 13.2...." Read the rest of the release announcement for more details. Download (mirrors): openSUSE-Factory-KDE-Live-Build0117-x86_64.iso (905MB, MD5, torrent), openSUSE-Factory-GNOME-Live-Build0117-x86_64.iso (906MB, MD5, torrent).

Lars Vogdt has announced the release of openSUSE 13.1.1 "Edu Li-f-e MATE" edition, a variant of openSUSE 13.1 designed for schools and featuring the MATE desktop environment: "The openSUSE-Education team is proud to present a special, 64-bit edition of openSUSE Edu Li-f-e with the MATE desktop environment. Li-f-e MATE edition came about to support schools in Gujarat, India. They needed a synfig studio: a very simple-to-use C and Java IDE, apart from standard fare of complete office suite and other applications. Gujarat now starts teaching OpenOffice (LibreOffice) in the 9th grade, and the Linux operating system all the way to shell scripting in 10th, and Java, C, HTML, JavaScript in the 11th and 12th grades. This Li-f-e edition tries to get everything they need in an integrated bundle which they can use on a stand-alone PC." Here is the full release announcement with a screenshot of the default desktop. Download: openSUSE-Edu-li-f-e-Mate.x86_64-13.1.1.iso (1,684MB, MD5).

The development of openSUSE 13.2, the distribution's next stable release whose availability is tentatively scheduled for November, has kicked off with its initial milestone build labeled as zero: "openSUSE Factory development is going steady and our venerable release manager has made a first milestone available. No development schedule has yet been determined, although it has been decided that we will aim for a release in November of this year. Although we're just at the start of our release cycle, this milestone already introduces a number of significant changes. The btrfs filesystem is default (and comes with btrfsprogs 3.12), as is the wicked network management tool and the dracut initrd replacement. YaST sports a new look and its Qt front-end is ported to Qt5. Zypper is at the 1.10.x branch for the next release, introducing a number of bug fixes and minor improvements. KDE Frameworks 5 packages are included, as well as the latest Application and Platform releases in the 4.x series. Our infrastructure is updated: rpm 4.11.2 introduces weak dependencies, PackageKit 0.8.16 comes with a new appdata format and there are binutils .24, Bluez 5.15, systemd 210, pulseaudio at 5.0 and the latest 3.14RC kernel...." Here is the full release announcement. Download (mirrors): openSUSE-Factory-KDE-Live-Build0117-x86_64.iso (805MB, SHA1, torrent), openSUSE-Factory-GNOME-Live-Build0117-x86_64.iso (748MB, SHA1, torrent).

Lars Vogdt has announced the release of openSUSE 13.1 "Education Li-f-e" edition, an openSUSE flavour designed specifically for schools and other educational institutions: "openSUSE Education community is proud to bring you openSUSE Education Li-f-e. It is based on the recently released openSUSE 13.1 with all the official online updates applied. We have put together a nice set of tools for everyone, including teachers, students, parents and IT administrators. It covers quite a lot of territory: from chemistry, mathematics to astronomy and geography. Whether you are into software development or just someone looking for a Linux distribution that comes with everything working out of the box, your search ends here. Let's briefly go through some of the thing you may find in this release." Continue to the release announcement to learn more. Download link: openSUSE-Edu-li-f-e.i686-13.1.1.iso (3,365MB, MD5, torrent).

The openSUSE project has announced the release of openSUSE 13.1, a major new version of one of the oldest and most popular Linux distributions available today: "Dear contributors, friends and fans: the release is here! Eight months of planning, packaging, adding features, fixing issues, testing and fixing more issues has brought you the best that free and open source has to offer, with our green touch: stable and awesome. This release did benefit from the improvements to our testing infrastructure and much attention to bug fixing. While a combination of over 6,000 packages supporting 5 architectures can never be perfect, we're proud to say this really does represent the best free software has to offer! The latest desktops (five of them!), server and cloud technologies, software development tools and everything in between are included." Read the comprehensive release announcement for more information, additional links and screenshots. Download: openSUSE-13.1-DVD-x86_64.iso (4,361MB, MD5, torrent), openSUSE-13.1-KDE-Live-x86_64.iso (942MB, MD5, torrent), openSUSE-13.1-GNOME-Live-x86_64.iso (947MB, MD5, torrent).

Jos Poortvliet has announced the availability of the second release candidate for openSUSE 13.1, a new version of the popular distribution scheduled for final release on 19 November: "The openSUSE 13.1 release is getting very close - just a little over two weeks, according to the roadmap. Today, release candidate 2 is available. The changes in this update are not very big or ground-shaking. This is a sign of openSUSE 13.1 maturing quickly: we focused on bug fixing. Below is a limited list of changes (omitting most bug fixes): systemd was updated to version 208; shim should now work which means the secure boot is possible; Plasma-nm no longer replaces KNetworkManager; Calibre is now fully operational; Linux kernel was updated with more fixes and one speedy improvement; in the area of virtualization the Xen and libvirt packages were updated...." Read the rest of the release announcement for a full list of changes and notes on testing. Download (mirrors): openSUSE-13.1-KDE-Live-Build0084-x86_64.iso (941MB, MD5, torrent), openSUSE-13.1-GNOME-Live-Build0084-x86_64.iso (945MB, MD5, torrent).

The openSUSE 13.1 development process is nearing its end, with the first of the two schedule release candidates now ready for testing: "The openSUSE 13.1 release is planned for November. In preparation, today we announce the availability of the first release candidate. Grab one of the images and help us test! As we’ve been in freeze since shortly after beta, most of the changes are bug fixes. A quick list of the major changes: KDE 4.11.2 and GNOME 3.10; Linux kernel 3.11.3 with load of Btrfs fixes; snapper 0.1.7; nginx - finally built properly; bluez5 - PulseAudio, GNOME and KDE integration to provide bluez5 is finally in place; plasma-nm - an alternative GUI for NetworkManager in KDE was adjusted and it now provides sane usability; tons of bugs fixed and closed; 'zypper dup' from 12.3 should not render the system unable to log in." Here is the full release announcement. Download (mirrors): openSUSE-13.1-KDE-Live-Build0041-x86_64.iso (922MB, MD5, torrent), openSUSE-13.1-GNOME-Live-Build0041-x86_64.iso (929MB, MD5, torrent).